By: V4 Agency
The French delegation of the European People’s Party finds the departure of Fidesz from the EPP saddening and sees it as a move which significantly weakens the group, French MEP Francois-Xavier Bellamy told Remix News.
The departure of Fidesz, Hungary’s governing party, from the EPP is obviously very bad news. The members of the French EPP delegation are saddened by the move and believe that it significantly weakens the group. The French delegation to the EPP will do everything to rebuild the link, MEP Francois-Xavier Bellamy told Remix News in a recent interview.
Bellamy said the French delegation had always supported Fidesz. In recent weeks, when certain MEPs wanted to exclude the party from the EPP group, the French members campaigned against it together with the German, Italian and Spanish delegations.
“The great paradox is that the Hungarians chose to leave at the moment when we had managed to move away from that perspective; but I can understand their choice, of course,” Bellamy noted.
The MEP also said that EPP President Donald Tusk had made it very clear that he was against the Fidesz’s membership, and some other members sided with him, but group leader Manfred Weber “never sought to lead a crusade” against the party.
Regarding the disagreements between the Hungarian delegation and a part of the People’s Party membership, Bellamy said, “the tragedy is that I see little substantive political disagreement behind the misunderstandings which have accumulated.”
“For example, the issue of migration is no longer really debated in the EPP today. The perspective proposed by Viktor Orban in 2015 has become widely accepted in the group. The rejection of the forced relocation of migrants is now being voiced by the President of the European Commission and Commissioner Margaritis Schinas. The fact that the Commissioner for Immigration is also responsible for protecting the European way of life shows that things have fundamentally changed and that the stance represented by Viktor Orban in 2015 has become widespread not only within the EPP, but in the European institutions in general,” Bellamy said.